Sir;
Donald Davie (letter, P·N·R 78) makes a number of extrapolations ('it is indecent ... to pry into the affairs of sociologists and lawyers'; 'let the literary man attend to poems and novels and plays, not to larger ... issues that are not his concern') from my suggestion that he ought to engage directly with the major postmodernists. Since, however, he proceeds to do just that, I shall leave my original letter to fend for itself and follow him into more interesting terrain.

It is worth contrasting his response to Lyotard with a key statement in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry:

we have not measured up to the challenge which Lawrence throws down, we have not measured the risk which Lawrence is prepared to take with the inherited cultural goods of our civilization, if we think we can take Lawrence on Lawrence's own terms while still keeping Shakespeare or Donne unshaken in their honoured niches. Lawrence would deny to such masters from the past any room at all so spacious as the generations before him had agreed to allow them ... It is not surprising, and it is certainly not disgraceful, that English poets have refused to take that risk and pay that price. (147/151)

The chapter devoted to him is an analysis, precisely, of 'Lawrence on Lawrence's own terms', followed by an indignant rejection of them. And this treatment seems to me not only stimulating, but exemplary. Faced with Lyotard's comparable position, however, Davie has constructed an opponent out of straw.

To begin with, it would be hard to imagine anything less characteristic of Lyotard, even on the evidence of The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (literally an official report, commissioned by the government of Quebec), than 'exasperated yawns'! His account of contemporary 'language games' is polymathic: Gödel's theorem, Gauss's curve, Kuhn's paradigms and Mandelbrot's fractals are among the entities intriguingly deployed. The ostensibly neutral argument may indeed be 'a thinly veiled polemic' (Jameson), but Davie's summary - 'Lyotard's anathema on modernism casts into outer darkness every intellectual or imaginative enterprise that can be seen as under the sign of "the Enlightenment"' - is barely recognizable even as a caricature. Having listed the 'erstwhile honoured figures ... we have surpassed and must cast aside', he cites, in the way of evidence for 'this drastic holocaust of reputations', a single 'categorical' paragraph.

What, then, is Lyotard actually quoted as saying? That the 'modern era that dates from the Enlightenment ... has now run its course'; that 'this modern era was predicated on the notion of progress ... which was thought of as leading to a truly emancipated society'; and that 'development continues to take place without leading to the realization of any of these dreams of emancipation'. Davie accepts that this is 'gravely said; and not to be set aside lightly'; the question is, how does it substantiate his indictment? To assert that an era has 'run its course' is hardly to pronounce an 'anathema' upon it; and is it so mystifying that the notion of 'progress' - towards the AppleMac and the NHS, but also towards arms-trade war and environmental catastrophe - should come under friendly fire? If the 'Englightenment' (a lovely misprint I suggest we retain) has culminated in the 'consumer society', might there not be something in the charge? The propositions are disputable, but also worth disputing.

In the treatment of 'the gurus of postmodernism', to whom some conveniently malignant nonsense is attributed ('be a consumer in earnest, all the way!'; 'look for all you can get: "a piece of the action"'; 'relish (the) festival of carnage'), caricature gives way to travesty. It is not necessary to take Lyotard's 'side' to respect a challenge to the liberal tradition in the name of one of its own highest values: his invocation of 'justice' against 'consensus' is characteristically severe. For as regards 'the consumer society', 'permissive eclecticism', the 'heartless', 'unfeeling ... frivolity' imputed to those 'French gurus', Lyotard is as scathing as Davie, or, for that matter, as 'F.R. Leavis's ghost':

Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats MacDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and 'retro' clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games ... Artists, gallery owners, critics, and public wallow together in the 'anything goes' ... But this realism of the 'anything goes' is in fact that of money ... Such realism accommodates all tendencies, just as capital accommodates all 'needs', providing that the tendencies and needs have purchasing power.

Afraid that postmodernism 'would ... homogenize us', Davie retaliates by homogenizing postmodernism; by failing, or refusing, to make discriminations, even in the light of his own misgivings. For of course Prynne is not 'merely a British Ashbery' ('Both Keery and Appleyard read him thus ...')! As Davie himself has shown, Prynne's American affinities are with the Black Mountain rather than New York, but it is nonetheless possible (with acknowledgements to Thomas Hardy and British Poetry) to place his 'strictly English localism of moral candour' ('On the Matter of Thermal Packing') in the direct line of succession from Wordsworth. It is indeed, in significant respects, conscientiously bourgeois. The extraordinary conclusion that 'Prynne's poetry ... must exclude any content that throws up "great, intense moments" ' is triumphantly deduced from an 'illogical' statement by yet another intermediary; but would it survive a consideration of 'Treatment in the Field'? As for the requirement that the feelings of 'people who have been grievously hurt ... be acknowledged in poetry even if poetry cannot soothe them', I suggest Davie takes another look at 'Concerning Quality, Again':

Talking to the man hitching a lift back from the hospital, I was incautious in sympathy: will she be back soon I was wishing to encourage his will to suppose. I can hardly expect her back he said and the water fell again, there was this sheet ...

As regards Ashbery, Davie identifies the 'stable identity' of 'a poetic "self" determining or limiting the operations of the language' with 'subjectivity' itself, which is surely a mistake. He objects that 'it is usually impossible to say what an Ashbery poem is about', but an Ashbery poem is about just that: far from having been 'ironed out of the art', 'subjectivity', with all its kinks, is Ashbery's constant theme. I find it astonishing that his unprecedented combinations of irony and wonder, the sublime and the ridiculous, the pointless and the unforgettable, move Davie only to 'exasperated yawns'.

My 'emollient proposal' accepts that 'we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile celebration of it is complacent and corrupt' (Jameson). The last thing I meant to advocate was 'permissive eclecticism'; I was insisting on a distinction between 'the fatuities trading under the label "postmodernism"' - which certainly includes many tedious poems - and the genuine article. As regards A Various Art, Davie's appraisal of Douglas Oliver's 'Bonis Avibus' (P·N·R 70) is a generous and illuminating one, but I find the contrast with Prynne misleading ('such writing is ... at the opposite pole from Prynne's non-communicating severity'), since much of Oliver's poetry is itself 'decentred' ('Grevel Lindop's epithet'!), and thus, on Davie's own terms, 'postmodernist'. At least we agree, I take it, that Kind (Allardyce, Barnett, 1987) deserves to be better known - in common, I would say, with kindred collections by a generation of poets.

Davie wonders where to find 'an arrogant romp through the centuries brought to bear on the experience of reading poems'; which is pretty rich from the author of books on Pound! But it is true that worthwhile discussion of postmodernist poetry has been at best sporadic, which is why I should be sorry just to agree to differ: 'What may be called the tedium-quotient is plainly quite different for Keery ... and, admitting that, one admits, reluctantly, that further argument is fruitless'. Surely this is an implicit admission that 'the truth ... is inaccessible', an acquiescence in relativism, an evasion of 'responsibility'?

Davie has given English poetry 'new bearings' twice already - in Purity of Diction, and again in the Hardy book, respectively the manifesto and the definitive critique of 'The Movement'. His insistence on the common ground between Prynne, Fisher and Larkin appears, with the benefit of hindsight, truly inspired. It is never easy, with contemporaries, to see the wood for the trees; but, at this point in his researches into postmodernism, Davie seems unable to see any trees for undergrowth.
JAMES KEERY
Warrington, Cheshire

DEATH SENTENCES

Sir,
Grevel Lindop writes that those such as Richard Webster and himself who seek to dilute the principle of free expression in literary works wish 'merely' that The Satanic Verses should not appear in paperback. Merely? Merely?
NICHOLAS MURRAY
Presteigne, Powys

Sir,
May I respond as briefly as I can to Grevel Lindop's letter in P·N·R 78?

I wrote 'A man has been sentenced to death for writing a novel' because those words seem to me to describe what has happened, an event which would be farcical if it were not tragic. Mr Lindop has made some interesting legal and semantic points, but if he disagrees that fatwa means 'death sentence' all I can reply is: tell that to Salman Rushdie and his police bodyguards, if you can find them. At the time of writing, influential Muslims here and abroad continue to insist that Mr Rushdie's conversion to Islam is irrelevant, his offence is eternal, the sentence on him is irreversible, there can be no forgiveness in this world. Let us hope for a thaw, but at the moment the ice still looks pretty thick.

I see what Mr Lindop means - who could not? - about current legal constraints, but I would wish to place the emphasis elsewhere. His '... unqualified "free expression" does not and could not exist' sounds conclusive. My starting-point is the strange fact, which may be verified from everyday experience, that power of unqualified free expression is precisely what we have. We are, absolutely, free to say what we like and write as we please. It is arguably the only absolute freedom we possess, and it is the absolute nature of the freedom that makes the problems of choice so interesting. The freedom itself is rightly regarded as beyond price, and it is seriously abused in only an infinitesimal number of cases. In a society in which it has come to be taken for granted, human beings will naturally, spontaneously and usually non-violently 'correct' one another. To this de facto freedom operative in ordinary daily life we are also indebted for most of the world's greatest literature, music and painting. Recognition of what is and what is not 'against the law' at any given moment in English legal history is a separate matter, different in kind, which involves simultaneous recognition of the fact that laws change. Absolutes do not change. Freedom of expression is an absolute.

This controversy is not only about freedom of expression: it is also, and I would say primarily, about intimidation. I believe (subject to correction) that if there had been no 'Rushdie affair' a paperback edition of The Satanic Verses would have followed the hardback as a matter of course. If that is so, why has there been no paperback? Either (a) we have decently and honourably deferred to Muslim opinion; or (b) we have been successfully intimidated. If (a) strikes us as the correct answer, then we have been misguided. British Muslim opinion is divided, with approximately 90% against the fatwa; so we have deferred not to Muslim opinion as such but to the opinion of a minority of extremists - a minority within a minority, in fact. If (b) is the correct answer, we should be ashamed of ourselves.

In his P·N·R 76 article Grevel Lindop refers to Richard Webster's suggestion that 'no paperback of The Satanic Verses should be published in the foreseeable future', and adds: 'The present stalemate allows both self-appointed "sides" to feel that a limited victory has been won.' I would argue that, on the contrary, by virtue of the long stalemate everybody has lost. The present state of affairs is bad for moderate Muslims because it means that they are unjustly counted with the extremists. It is bad for the extremists because it makes them feel that intimidation has worked; and it is bad for the rest of us for precisely the same reason. Nothing less than the withdrawal and pulping of all existing copies of the hardback would satisfy the extremists. They must be aware that this demand is unrealistic: the book exists in the world; it may be bought in almost any bookshop; many copies are in private hands; it is not humanly possible for a recently published book to be un-written and de-published out of social existence. It is therefore difficult to see how the simultaneous existence of paperback copies of the same work could constitute further provocation. But paperback publication would be good for the morale of the moderate majority - of Muslims and non-Muslims alike - as a clear sign that intimidation has not worked after all. The paperback should be published as soon as possible, perhaps by a consortium of publishers, as was suggested long ago; perhaps with the support of the International Committee for the Defence of Salman Rushdie, and other interested groups; perhaps with additional support by means of direct subscription from the public. The more clearly the project is seen as a near-unanimous public enterprise, the better.

In modern Britain Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, Quakers, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Spiritualists and many others - I might add humanists and socialists - have become quite used to being questioned, cross-examined, harangued, laughed at and satirized for their beliefs. Their response to these 'attacks', whether spoken or written, is usually rational enough to be non-violent: either the 'attack' is ignored or the 'attacked' party will 'counter-attack', the 'weapons' used in these exchanges being the spoken word and the written word. In extreme cases - in extremely rare cases - people will take an offender to court; but to call for his death would be considered a disproportionate reaction to provocation. Likewise book-burning, arson attacks on bookshops and so on. Non-violent response is the norm, and it is much to be desired that all British Muslims should adopt that norm and follow commonly accepted ways.

The introduction of new laws might appeal to lawyers, but I don't think it would benefit society at large. One man's 'scurrilous abuse' is another man's imaginative study, another's genial satire, another's sober critique, another's work of art. The most telling comment I have seen on the subject of new laws was made by Nicolas Walter, of the Rationalist Press Association, in his letter published in the TLS on 18 January of this year. In reply to Richard Webster's suggestion in a previous letter (11 January) that there might be a law against 'incitement to religious hatred', Mr Walter pointed out that such a law has been in existence in Northern Ireland for more than twenty years. As for abolition, Grevel Lindop is certainly right to maintain (in P·N·R 76) that if the present blasphemy law were to be abolished '... Christianity would continue to enjoy powerful unofficial protection, whilst followers of other religions could be told blandly that no religion was privileged'. I see no way round this. The religious orientation of most people in this country is Christian, or semi-Christian, or post-Christian, and the ethical orientation of most atheists and agnostics is, for historical reasons, 'Christian'. Although some atheists may consider this suggestion a scurrilous attack on their irreligion, I do not expect to receive a death threat for having made it. At all events, it is inevitable that the religion of a majority will enjoy comparatively privileged status, and this will remain a fact of life whether the present blasphemy law is abolished or not. However, I do not agree with Grevel Lindop that this is necessarily 'worrying'. Surely it is exactly the state of affairs that obtains in Islamic countries; and indeed why shouldn't it?
ALAN MASSEY
Windsor, Berks.

Grevel Lindop replies:

I do not understand Mr Massey's notion of an absolute and timeless freedom of expression which exists regardless of what the law allows or fobids. How can such a freedom have taken, as Mr Massey previously told us, 'centuries to win'?

I find, if possible, even more puzzling Mr Massey's final paragraph which seems to imply that we should happily accept the tyranny of the majority religion. If this is absolute freedom, most of us would prefer the ordinary kind which is both protected and limited by law.

LAURA (RIDING) JACKSON

Sir,
John Aldridge, RA, the landscape painter who died a few years ago, painted (I believe they were his only ones) two first-rate portraits. One was of Robert Graves, and is now in the National Portrait Gallery. The other - a highly charged, basilisk sort of picture, brilliantly done - was of Laura Riding. Does anyone know where it is now?
MICHAEL RIVIèRE
North Walsham, Norfolk

Sir,
I would like to add to your timely celebration of Laura (Riding) Jackson a view of her work's character, theme, and reception.

Characteristic in its huge simplicity and quiet moral gravity is this question, from 1969: 'Were these not beings who knew another kind of bravery, that of defending their best against their worst, instead of choosing to be impartial between them?'

But it can be an unnerving question too (and herein, I suspect, inheres the so-called 'difficulty' of her work): must it not seem to upset the spiritual status quo, 'the delicate balance maintained between decisiveness and indecisiveness in the milieu for the presumed comfort of everyone concerned'? (1970)
Because her work in its essence is of the character of attestation, suitable response to it could only be in kind. Attestation to what? To the possibility of there being a good truth of existence yet to be delivered, and the practicability of delivering it into good utterance.

I argue no case for her work's merit relative to other bodies of work, though I acknowledge that this occasion cannot be kept innocent of the politics of literary historiography.

I do argue, or urge, (against the grain of your editorial, I feel) the merit of the later work relative to the earlier, and especially of The Telling: comprising both 'core-part' and added material, it is itself the core-part, surely, of her life's work. Its theme, in epitome, is that of all her work: the speaking part humans have from being in giving it back its meaning - the meaning good it shared with them. Or, as she put it in P·N·R recently: 'that being be well spoken'.

As for 'difficulty', it perhaps has a different look by now; after all (paraphrasing a 1938 remark): it is less difficult to live well than to live badly.
JOHN NOLAN
London

THE DRY SALVAGES

Sir,
Professor Davie has attempted to judge 'The Dry Salvages' not by its heights, but on the basis of a few of the less successful details: an approach that would be 'devastating' - the word he quotes approvingly about himself - applied to any poet, not excluding Davie.

So before agreeing that Eliot is 'a journalist addressing his "concerned" readership' and that 'The Dry Salvages' 'is quite simply rather a bad poem', it is worth looking, not quite 'simply', at some of those details.

One of the most powerful pieces of 20th-century poetry is the section beginning 'The river is within us, the sea is all about us'. In spite of the overt statement, and the more important resonances that follow, Davie finds the river and ocean 'unallegorized' - if that is the precise word, which it is not: he means, however, that 'the river is a river, and a quite specific river, the Mississippi'; and, by extension, the ocean is nothing but the ocean. If this were someone less than Davie one would have to conclude he cannot read, for it implies he can perceive no 'sea of eternity' in 'the tolling bell /That measures time not our time' - to say nothing of the beautiful obliquities that surround the plain statement. Incredible as it may seem, there is supporting evidence of Davie's shut mind: for instance, he contemptuously dismisses the evocative lines beginning 'His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom'.

He is also unable to read The Dry Salvages as a 'multi-vocal poem', which it is at so many points. He not only states that it is univocal, he opens his article with an evident inability to read the first line, 'I do not know much about gods ...' The persona could not be univocally Eliot, as he implies. True, the light hint at the God who lives in a cloud of unknowing is all Eliot; but the speaker is someone from Hemingway, let us say. (I seem to recall that some Hemingway character does in fact mutter something very like this.) But certainly not Eliot himself, whom we know to be more deeply read in the gods, and not just the Christian God, than most people, and more deeply versed in prayer.

Well, the rhymes in what Davie curiously calls a sestina are a little laboured - though their refrigerating isolation exaggerates the problem. 'Worshippers of the machine' is not very happy, either - though the point is dismissal not of technology but idolatry, the theme of the whole passage. The phrase is hardly 'journalistic': newspapers are likely to promote various contemporary idolatries, including this.

It is common critical knowledge that no long poem can maintain itself at the same pitch. People have had a lot of self-satisfaction poking fun at the banalities in The Prelude; but the dogs bark, the caravan moves on, The Prelude remains, and the dogs are dead. Eliot was consciously allowing for the difficulty through multivocal changes of tone and style. Hence the passage 'It seems as one becomes older ...' This is prose, yes; but the poem's worth as a whole, and as part of a greater whole, is not undermined by this deliberate greyness. To foreground it as a dismissal of the poem's total effect looks uncomfortably like - well, slanted journalism.

What else has Davie to say? Much about tone. And the rest is innuendo or open censoriousness about the complications of Eliot's life, necessarily based on fourth-hand reports, and unpleasantly and irrelevantly taking up the space needed for discussion of the poem.

If we are to talk about tone, is not Davie here on dangerous ground? If Eliot is a 'Unitarian minister addressing his "concerned" congregation', a man of 'ravenous egotism', 'cruelly keeping a New England spinster on a string for forty years', and so on and so on, what shall we say of Davie? A pharisee, comminating from an intemperate puritan pulpit, judging without fear of being judged? For one 'anxious to join Eliot in Christian orthodoxy' he seems a poor pupil: expecting Eliot to be free of original sin, and evidently assuming himself to be. It is parlous to arrogate the prerogative God reserves for himself at the 'last' - thank God - judgement. Eliot certainly made no mistake about his own need for forgiveness and mercy: the evidence of it is everywhere in his writings and on his memorial plaque. But how fauxnaive to be astonished that Eliot was 'often bewildered'! How could he not be, and is not such bewilderment acknowledged to be at the heart of poetry and of being human?

If, as Davie implies, The Dry Salvages is the crack in the golden bowl of a masterpiece, then his tone ought to be one of dismay - for the impoverishment of us all. In spite of some hypocritical moments, the tenor is one of satisfaction in his own devastatingness.

But the failure of tone and the vituperativeness point to why he cannot 'read' the poem; not, of course, a breakdown of intelligence but a failure of heart, of sympathy. He finds Eliot so repugnant - internal evidence suggests Eliot's status in his lifetime was too galling - he cannot take his meaning.

I am undoubtedly equally biased. As a sixth-former, warned off the fraudulent Eliot by my English master, I came across the shilling edition of the The Dry Salvages in W.H. Smith's the year it came out. It was the first Eliot I read - I think luckily. It took a long time before my fervent response became conscious understanding, but the years showed the poem's wisdom - a very rare item in literature of this century. The poem has lasted better than most things I read then: it will be remembered, I wager, and loved for its spirituality and artistry when Davie is a footnote, if that. It would be a great misfortune if anyone were temporarily put off reading it.
HERBERT LOMAS
Aldeburgh, Suffolk

Donald Davies replies

I contended that The Dry Salvages is 'univocal' as compared with such multi-vocal poems as The Waste Land, Ash-Wednesday, and Coriolan. This does not mean - how could it? - that the voice which speaks The Dry Salvages is the voice of Thomas Stearns Eliot. The voice that speaks is a fabricated voice, as the voice that speaks any poem is of course fabricated; no voice that speaks a poem is, quite simply and unequivocally, the naked voice of the poet. That nakedness, however the poet may aim at it, is unattainable. So to say of Eliot that he was 'more deeply read in the gods, and not just the Christian God, than most people', may or may not be true; it has no bearing on the trust that we may or should give to the voice that speaks The Dry Salvages. That voice was one of many voices available to Thomas Stearns Eliot; and my contention was that of all the voices available this was one of the least persuasive and most vulnerable.

Just because it is vulnerable, it is also intimate. And I see very well that to those who read a poem in order to be intimate with its author, such a poem is more than usually precious. In this piece Eliot, normally such a guarded poet, drops his guard - more than he meant to. To strike at him when his guard is down may seem unchivalrous; but chivalry, though it names a code that in many relationships I respect, seems out of place in the relationship between a poet and his readers. There are many, like Herbert Lomas, who will chivalrously leap to the defence of their poet; but there has to be space left for such as me who unchivalrously murmur that the emperor has few clothes on. Eliot is dead, full of honours; his poem is on the syllabus and in the canon. What matters now is not him, nor his poem, but poetry.

DEPARTURES

Sir,
I have just cancelled my subscription to P·N·R. I cancelled it once before, then renewed it in the hope that things might have improved in the interim.

Well, they haven't. The article by Mr Tallis was of a standard I would have expected P·N·R to react to with a firm Non Satis. I suggest you, sir, read the Richmond lecture. Its urbane amusement at C.P. Snow contrasts strikingly with Mr Tallis's bigotry. That last word may seem strong, but what else is it, when work is so distorted to fit a parti pris? Leavis was at some pains to insist he had no animus against science or C.P. Snow in particular, but was concerned to make plain what should have been obvious to a schoolboy - namely that a man is a man before he is a scientist, that science serves human ends and that it is precisely these which the humanities and the English School exist, (or should exist), to enquire into. Let not Mr Tallis think his article was the last straw, however. (His tone suggests a man who might look for such satisfactions. He might crow.)

In its beginning, P·N·R looked to be a possibility of hope - there was Richard Swigg, there was, and still is, the challenging and witty Donald Davie, there were Tomlinson, Sisson, Graham ... And there were at least some reviewers who saw their function as something more than to puff received opinions. But there were always warning signs, not least the obsession with what passes as 'critical theory'. It's as if P·N·R's 'pluralism' (the word you take up from Octavio Paz) meant an unconsidered acceptance of whatever the drifting tides of academe might throw up on your shores. What a distinction - the beachcombers of criticism!

A fear of appearing illiberal seems to drive your anxiety to promote theory - any theory, however eccentric or self-contradictory or ludicrous. Perhaps this is the cause of your too-easily impressed welcome for Mrs Jackson's tortuous prose. As far as I can tell, she thinks that English poetry ended in 1938, when her own poetic work ended - an ending we are to see as final for all men, an ultimate impasse. I admire her confidence. But perhaps I misunderstand her.

It's hopeless. I don't think you care any more. P·N·R has become a ragbag of odds and ends, good critical articles contradicted by the worst academicism, good poems alongside mere aestheticism, firm reviews alongside Sunday supplement valuations. It doesn't cohere. This is not to be liberal but to be a straw for any wind that blows.

I cannot afford to lay out £21.50 without being more sure that whatever challenge P·N·R throws down will be a real challenge, grounded in a conviction of the importance of the critical function - the enquiry into what literature lives in and for our time, and the pointing to what lies dead in it, where necessary - a conviction open to dialogue and exchange, of course, since such conviction would entail that the aim is, as always, the common pursuit of true judgement. But dear me, how old-fashioned those phrases now sound!
KEITH TURNER
Leamington Spa, Warwicks